Bibliophile!

I love books. I’m hopelessly and forever enamored by them. I like how they feel, how they smell, how they look, and what I can learn from them. There is something about a physical book that a pdf file just doesn’t have. It depresses me that fewer and fewer people seem to have a love for reading.

This weekend, I went to a book sale. I go to them a lot. The joy of them, like thrift stores, comes from being able to buy a lot of material for little money. I wandered away with twenty pounds of books for $16. Amazing!

There were a few treasures in the collection: A 1961 book on radio transmitters, A book on the Johnstown flood, and a book about Tutankhamen written to cover a huge swath of Egyptian history.

The best item found, though, was a book called “The American Language” by my homeboy H. L. Mencken. He was a famous crank and he rants about the misapplication of English with rage and vitriol.

Here are some quotes from him:

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.